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Monday, September 26, 2016

Last week I promised an Italian Wars command stand and so with shortened breath I'm delighted to report that I've managed to deliver. In fact I even had time to gild my post with some do-it-yourself cypress trees, but more on those in a bit.

Readers with sharp eyes (and/or benefiting from week-long memories) will have noticed the drummer from my previous post is curiously absent. Well, being a fashion-forward kind of guy (cough, cough...) I realized that the drummer's rather 'busy' purple, buff, green and red outfit just wouldn't work with the clean-and-simple blue and white motif of Lucerne.

So, ordering a quick costume change that would make Karl Lagerfeld proud, I swapped-in a better garbed Swiss piper in the drummer's stead. La! The sartorial splendour of the Renaissance has been maintained. Phew!

The mounted figure is from Foundry's late medieval range while the two foot figures can be sourced from the Perry's somewhat vaguely titled 'European Armies' collection. The flag is from the talented Pete, from the much better described 'Pete's Flags'.

I quite like the forked beard of the Captain. I suggested this to Sarah as a future winter look for me, but strangely she rolled her eyes and returned to reading her book, which I believe roughly translates as, 'Don't, you'll look like a git'.

Right, moving along. In the quest to make my Italian Wars tabletop look a little more, um, 'Italian' I've decided that I needed some proper cypress trees to go with the nice rustic cottages I got from Grand Manner. I looked around the webiverse and found that my friend Simon (BigRedBat) had a wonderful tutorial on this very subject. Please check out his great how-to as I, being a brainless muppet, completely forgot to photograph my work-in-progress. Suffice it to say they are made of twisted pipe cleaners, glued to washers, painted green and liberally coated with PVA and green flock. Here are 5 of the blighters, but I did up a dozen for good measure.

I look at the finished product and feel the need to order a plate of prosciutto, a glass of red and finish it all with the Medici-esque poisoning of my rivals.